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Scout Finch and the Issue of Gender in to Kill a Mockingbird

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Scout Finch and the Issue of Gender in to Kill a Mockingbird FACULTADE DE FILOLOXÍA GRAO EN LINGUA E LITERATURA INGLESAS The girl who despised being called a “girl”: Scout Finch and the issue of gender in To Kill a Mockingbird Autora: Uxía García Ramallal Titor: José Manuel Barbeito Varela Curso: 2019/2020 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER 1. ADAPTING LITERARY WORKS TO FILM ......................................................... 6 FIDELITY. IS IT POSSIBLE? ....................................................................................... 6 REDEFINING APPROACHES. INTERTEXTUALITY. SHOWING VS. TELLING. ...................................................................................................................................... 12 2. THE SOUTH: AN OVERVIEW FROM 1930S TO 1960S ................................... 18 RACISM ...................................................................................................................... 21 SOCIAL DIVISION. CASTE AND CLASS ............................................................... 28 PATRIARCHY. GENDER .......................................................................................... 35 A RAY OF SUNSHINE IN THE DARK. OPTIMISM FOR THE FUTURE .............. 39 2. BEING A WOMAN IN A MAN’S WORLD ........................................................... 40 SCOUT’S REJECTION OF FEMININITY ................................................................. 43 THE INTERSECTION OF RACE, CLASS AND GENDER IN MAYCOMB’S FICTIONAL UNIVERSE. SCOUT FINCH, CALPURNIA AND MAYELLA EWELL: ALL DIFFERENT, ALL EQUAL ................................................................ 48 SCOUT ..................................................................................................................... 50 CALPURNIA ........................................................................................................... 52 MAYELLA .............................................................................................................. 56 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................ 59 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................ 61 2 3 4 INTRODUCTION The first time one finishes reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), one cannot help but think about how great a character Atticus Finch is. He teaches us an essential and unforgettable lesson in terms of justice, morality, and even fatherhood. In fact, most critics and scholars seem to share this same idea. Critical essays, theories, analyses, or reviews focus on the issue of racism mainly through Atticus’s defence of Tom Robinson. The trial of this black man is also the central element around which Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation revolves. It is indeed a crucial point in the novel, but there is something missing this account. What about Scout? Was not our young heroine supposed to be the protagonist? This is not Atticus’s story, but Scout’s. She, like the rest of female characters, deserves further examination and this must be carried out paying attention to gender issues. In this TFG I will perform a comparative analysis between three of the main female characters of Lee’s novel and Robert Mulligan’s film, focusing on Scout Finch, Calpurnia, and Mayella Ewell and on the social and racial aspects that separate them. Once I have compared Lee’s novel and its film version, my first aim will be to shed some light on the potential difficulties that arise in the process of adaptation. My second aim will be to understand what being a woman in a man’s world entailed, from Lee’s perspective, in the context of Southern 1930s patriarchal society in the USA. Even though novels and film adaptations have often been analysed on the basis of fidelity, this does not mean that it is the only or necessarily the best approach. By comparing some of the elements of Lee’s novel and Mulligan’s film version we will see what are the limitations that hinder the process of conversion from one medium to the 5 other, and what alternative approaches to fidelity ought to be taken into account when doing so. Written in the mid-1950s and published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird encompasses and touches on numerous historical events that turned out to be decisive for the progress of the American nation and for its transformation into what it is today. The war between Unionists and Confederates, the abolition of slavery and the Great Depression of the 1930s were just some of the numerous episodes that marked a milestone in the history of America and which brought about a series of consequences that would affect the American population not only in real life, but also in fiction, as in the case of To Kill a Mockingbird and the fictional town of Maycomb. By the time the novel was published and its film adaptation released (1962), the civil rights movement had already begun. However, given that Scout’s story is set in the 1930s, the struggle of African Americans to bring segregation and racial discrimination to an end was not part of Lee’s novel. Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to the context and to the temporal distance between the plot time and the author’s time in order to study the effects of the changes that took place between these two periods (1930s – 1960s). Once the main historical and social aspects of the 1930s have been accounted for, it will be easier to understand what it meant to be a woman in a male-dominated world. Although apparently different, Scout, Calpurnia and Mayella, three of the most relevant female characters of the story, are essentially the same; three women united by a single cause. 6 Through the use of the theoretical framework and perspective of intersectionality, a term coined in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw, I will tackle the multiple ways in which they experience discrimination mainly on the grounds of sex, class and race. Finally, after a brief summary I will draw some conclusions with regard to the different sections of the research, setting forth the possible difficulties that I may have found when writing the TFG. 1. ADAPTING LITERARY WORKS TO FILM There have been many attempts to develop a theory that could explain the process of adaptation from one medium (the linguistic) to another (the visual), and yet no consensual nor decisive solution has been reached thus far. An adaptation is neither a copy nor a reproduction, for “[j]ust as there is no such thing as a literal translation, there can be no literal adaptation” (Hutcheon 16). Adaptation is at the same time an interpretation and a recreation of the source text in a new medium, and “it involves both memory and change, persistence and variation” (Hutcheon 173). The OED defines adaptation as “an altered or amended version of a text, musical composition, etc., (now esp.) one adapted for filming, broadcasting, or production on the stage from a novel or similar literary source.” ("adaptation, n.") On the basis of this definition, the biggest challenge is deciding how, to what extent, and why the original source has been “altered”. FIDELITY. IS IT POSSIBLE? The adaptation of novels into films has been for a long time judged, mainly, according to the idea of fidelity. The problem is that novel and film do not belong to the same medium and cannot be analysed in the same way. Just as we cannot analyse a novel and a song (or 7 rather, its score) as if they were alike, neither can we compare a novel and a film as if they shared the same features. The American film critic Andrew Sarris stated that the main difference between literature and film was that “[l]iterature is what you read from a printed page, and film is what you see, hear and even read on the screen” (13). Although this is an obvious distinction, it is often overlooked when discussing fidelity. If we take this into account, it cannot be argued that a film is good or bad because it is more or less faithful to the novel it is based on. We can consider certain films better than others, and the same happens with books, but “[i]f a film is considered “better” or “worse” than the novel, the comparison, strictly speaking, is made between that film and other films” (Bluestone, “Word to Image” 175). Otherwise, it would not make sense, for we would be obviating the particular and specific demands of the two different genres and media. Once we acknowledge the distinctive features, “[t]he reconstructed judgement may then read: A is better as a film than B is as a novel. A cannot be directly compared with B because the scales of judgement are different” (Bluestone, “Word to Image” 175). Rather than fidelity, what film critics are concerned with is: “has the film been successful?” instead of “is the film faithful to the novel?”. In the words of George Bluestone, “[w]henever a film becomes a financial or even a critical success, the question of “faithfulness” is given hardly any thought … The film makers are content with the assumption that they have mysteriously captured the “spirit” of the book. The issue goes no further” (“Word to Image” 180). As long as the film is a commercial success and the box-office receipts satisfactory, the question of fidelity or faithfulness ceases to be a problem. It will no longer matter whether the film is faithful to the novel or not; and what is more, in most cases, fidelity to the original will be taken for granted. What does fidelity mean? What does
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